Catch My Drift Read online

  “May I?” Amanda gestured toward the living room.

  “Absolutely.”

  Spacious and south facing, the living room was, in Lorna’s opinion, the house’s finest feature. She watched Amanda look from the old fireplace, still ornamented with original turn-of-the-century tile, up to the domed light fixture on the ceiling.

  “It’s really quite something in here when the sun’s out.” Lorna strengthened her voice, trying to sound warm and credible.

  Amanda nodded toward the piano nestled in the nook of the window. “Do you play?”

  “No,” Lorna said, walking toward it. “I keep meaning to learn.” She hadn’t yet figured out what she’d do with the piano in an apartment. It had been Lorna’s mother’s, and Lorna was attached. Twenty-five years ago, her father showed her how to play the “Heart and Soul” duet, and Lorna had taught herself the melody of a few Beatles songs with her right hand, but eventually she grew bored by her limitations. She asked her father for lessons, but they were never arranged. Lorna wondered now if her father thought it would be disloyal to have another piano teacher in the house.

  Lorna ran her finger along the music rack, feeling the salty sting of dust on her chlorine-chapped fingertips. She was pregnant with Cara when she and Alex moved the piano out of her father’s storage and into the house. She’d fantasized about a daughter in a crushed-velvet recital dress, cheeks flushed, chubby little fingers on the keys. She still had flashes of this happy fantasy when she glimpsed the piano after the doors to the living room had been closed for a while. She needed to remind herself that her kids were big now. That Cara, who still couldn’t read music after two years of lessons, had begged and begged to quit. Being brought back to reality could feel to Lorna like a kind of death.

  Amanda twisted her gold rope necklace. “We could probably just knock this room out, right? Open up the foyer?”

  Lorna took the suggestion like a kick in the spine. This was, of course, another reason agents took charge of showing a house.

  “More modern, right? For entertaining?” Amanda said. Having had enough of the living room, she was heading toward the staircase.

  “Whereabouts do you live now?” Lorna asked, trailing behind, as though Amanda were showing her the house.

  “Alberta now. But we’ve lived everywhere. Alaska, Texas.”

  “Oh,” Lorna said. “How exciting.” She blushed at her flat delivery. She’d never been good at this sort of chat.

  “Always the middle of nowhere. My husband’s in oil,” she said. She touched her belly gently. “We’re going to try something more urban for a while.”

  “This house is very central.”

  Amanda shrugged. “I’m not so sure that I’m a Toronto gal.”

  Lorna considered what defined a Toronto gal. Perhaps some brutish individual who didn’t take off shoes, like herself.

  “My husband went to university here,” Amanda said.

  “I see,” Lorna said vaguely.

  “So he knows the vicinity.”

  “It’s a terrific . . . vicinity.”

  “How long have you lived here?” Amanda looked around the room.

  “A little over ten years.” They’d begun renting the place from Alex’s father when he moved to Florida in 1979, then inherited part of the house when he died two years later. Alex was still buying the rest from his older sister. It was a creaky midtown Victorian with knob and tube, poor insulation, and a roof that leaked. Over the years, they had spent most of Lorna’s inheritance on the house’s upkeep. This was a point of some contention because Alex’s parents had also owned a run-down lake house on an enviable chunk of land up north, a property Alex inherited outright and the sale of which would have allowed Lorna to hang on to her money. But Alex, irritatingly, was sentimental about the old place. Lorna was sure no one, not even Alex, had been up there in over two years.

  Lorna was about to offer to take Amanda upstairs when the doorbell rang again.

  “That’ll be him,” Amanda said.

  “Good timing.” Lorna strode toward the front door, but she didn’t open up right away. There, on the other side of the bevelled glass, was Kenneth Kravchuk. Kenneth, just standing there, huffing on his glasses. Lorna’s throat contracted; she turned the knob slowly and managed to smile as Kenneth looked up, but a flicker of panic in his face stopped her from greeting him by name. His eyes moved quickly across her. Then he looked over his shoulder, like he might just take off.

  “Took you long enough,” Amanda said, coming up behind Lorna. “But listen, apparently if you live here you can get a parking permit or something.”

  Kenneth set his glasses back on his face. He looked only at Amanda.

  “Can I take your coat?” Lorna was surprised by the smallness of her voice. As she reached for the coat, her hands were shaky.

  “I’m fine.” Kenneth’s voice was deeper than Lorna remembered, but even through his beige raincoat, she could see that he’d kept his swimmer’s V. His face was still thin, all points and angles.

  “This is Laura. She’s the owner,” Amanda said. “But she’s going to show us around anyway. Isn’t that kind of her?”

  “It’s really no problem.” Lorna tried again to catch his eye.

  Kenneth did not remove his smooth leather shoes. He brought his fingers to his mouth and rubbed his nail against his tooth. She knew this gesture. She wished he’d never told her what a comfort it was to feel the smoothness of a nail against a tooth. It was a habit she’d picked up herself way back when. “Actually,” he said. “We don’t have a ton of time.”

  Amanda sighed. “Where do we need to be? We can be late, Ken. This might be it.” She turned to Lorna. “Kenneth’s got this eye. He could have been an architect.” She brought her hands together and then broke them apart. “We want a place we can just crack into. Really reveal what’s there.”

  Lorna moved out of the way. “Please,” she said. “Go forth and conquer.” She attempted to laugh, felt a prickly redness spread across her face.

  Kenneth nodded, swallowed. That sharp glug of his Adam’s apple. Lorna always marvelled at how he managed to shave over it. Did Amanda think about that? Did she sit on the edge of the tub and talk to him while he shaved? Did he tell her secrets? The names of his exes?

  “Want to look upstairs, hon?” Amanda said.

  If Kenneth was behaving out of character, Amanda didn’t appear to notice. With a hand on his back, she steered him past the living room, waving the fact of it away. Lorna kept a few paces behind, watching the back of Kenneth’s head as they climbed the stairs. Sometimes she thought about running into him downtown. In these fantasies, she would be with Ian, her tall, handsome boss. She’d be wearing an important black skirt and jacket combo, the new green pumps she hadn’t yet felt bold enough to wear. They would be walking and laughing, their head tossed back in sheer joie de vivre. Kenneth would stare as she strode off, knocked out by her apparent life success and general beauty. About six or seven years back, she actually thought she did see him once in a hot dog line outside City Hall. She’d been skating with the kids, had a cold sore, and was feeling Christmas fat, so she hadn’t approached.

  Amanda ran her hand along the banister, her ring scraping against the wood. The diamond looked sharp and pointy. “What’s the square footage?”

  “About fifteen hundred.”

  “Bigger than it looks,” Amanda said, smiling in Kenneth’s direction.

  “More if you count the yard,” Lorna said.

  Kenneth’s first floor bachelor at the Northway was four hundred square feet. Lorna hadn’t minded the smallness. It was back when she believed that making sacrifices automatically meant better things to come. When she moved in at the end of January, her legs still in casts, he told her the little cement balcony would be great extra space in summer. She told him she knew how to grow tomatoes. The whole thing was romantic.

  As Lorna followed Kenneth into the den, her eyes seemed only to find the things that had once bee
n theirs: the trunk of high school trophies and letters they’d used as a coffee table, her mint table lamp, the ficus tree. On the TV stand, there was a photograph of Debbie, Cara’s godmother. Would Kenneth remember the freckled girl who lived seventeen floors above them? The girl whose roommate ad he’d handed to her the day he left? He probably wouldn’t know that she was dead now. A winter car accident, like the one that did in Lorna’s knees, only far worse.

  Kenneth paused at the built-in bookshelf, touching the wood, looking at the rows of books and magazines. He put a knobby finger on a 1973 world atlas, tilting it gently toward him.

  “This is nice,” Amanda said from the other side of the room. “Cozy.”

  Lorna moved closer to Kenneth. “You want that?” Her throat clenched. She waved at the bookcase and swallowed. “I’m getting rid of a bunch of this, so . . . ”

  Amanda let out a nervous laugh from across the room. “What? No. Ken totally does that. He thinks he can just touch everything.”

  Kenneth pulled the atlas out and stared at the cover. He knocked it gently with his knuckle. “Thanks,” he said.

  It had been a long time since Lorna had looked at that atlas. The page she’d shown Kenneth on Sierra Leone — a destination of sun and seawater, just like he said he wanted — was surely still folded. She pitched Sierra Leone as somewhere he could use his engineering degree to build water pumps while she taught English. She was sure they could be happy there. But in any case, other pages were folded now. The kids used the atlas for school projects all the time. She’d buy them a new one.

  Looking embarrassed, Amanda drifted out of the room, leaving Lorna and Kenneth alone. Let him make the first move, she thought. She wished she wasn’t carrying the extra fifteen pounds. Her waist, when he held it fifteen years ago, had been so narrow.

  “You need to see this, Ken,” Amanda called from down the hall.

  Kenneth cleared his throat, still examining the bookshelf. Lorna ran her hands down the sides of her jeans. Could he smell the chlorine in her hair? Was he curious if she still swam?

  “Excuse me, ” Kenneth said, and he walked out of the room.

  In the master bedroom, Amanda paused at the school photos of Cara and Jed on the dresser.

  “Two children?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “The boy’s handsome,” Amanda said.

  “Thank you.” Lorna knew it. Still in middle school, Jed already looked seventeen. He was tall, his hair was long, and he dressed cool, seeming to have a natural instinct for what that required. Lorna looked at the picture of Cara. Did anything about her daughter strike people? She had Alex’s flecky brown eyes, his thick lashes, but Lorna’s thin lips. Jed had inherited Alex’s even complexion, but Cara’s skin lacked decision: pink and white, sometimes half and half, and getting oilier with age. Her hair was also losing its childhood blond. Now that Lorna looked at the photo, at her daughter’s hair pulled thinly over one shoulder, she could see that it was almost completely mousy. But she wasn’t a bad-looking girl, was she?

  Lorna glanced at Kenneth, who had wandered over to the windows facing the street. Thin winter rain scratched at the glass. Did Kenneth find it interesting that she had two children? Was he even a little curious what they looked like? She thought he might already have kids, too.

  “Do you need a bigger place?” Amanda was looking at Lorna with a pucker between her eyebrows, an abrupt disruption to her smooth face. She glanced around quickly. “I mean, can I ask why you’re selling?”

  Lorna looked from Amanda back to Kenneth, who glanced her way now, too. Did he suspect a marriage gone awry? To Lorna, it became desperately important for him not to think this.

  “Actually, it’s a funny story.” Lorna’s voice quickened with the lie. “We’ve inherited something. Quite unexpectedly, to be honest.”

  Amanda’s face relaxed. “Wonderful.” Then she clapped her hand to her forehead. “I mean, I’m sorry. For the death. I’m guessing it was someone close.”

  “Thank you.” She looked over for Kenneth’s reaction, but he’d disappeared into the ensuite. “It’s really fine.”

  Lorna watched from the side of the bed as Amanda and Kenneth explored the bathroom. She felt tense watching Kenneth slide open the shower curtain. She knew tiles were missing in three places in the tub: bare squares of putty lined with black threads of mould that she’d tried to hide with carefully arranged shampoo bottles. There were also stains on the enamel sink, scribbled over with a whiteout pen. Kenneth was always obsessive about hygiene. Once, early on, he brought her home a bouquet of new toothbrushes because hers, he said, had become too ratty. The gesture shamed rather than touched her.

  Kenneth slid the curtain closed and moved on to inspect the cabinetry under the mirror. “Nice storage,” he said, opening and closing one of the drawers.

  “Thank you. Husband did that.” She felt a heavy flush in her cheeks again. She was sure she’d never used the word husband like that before, without a possessive pronoun.

  He squinted up at her. “You’ve had a lot of interest?”

  Lorna turned slightly. “Quite a bit.”

  The three of them moved quickly through the kids’ rooms. Cara’s pink walls were covered in pin-ups from Teen Day magazine: squatting, smiling young men with baggy pants and blousy shirts, their hair shaved at the sides and slicked back on top.

  “Your daughter’s into the New Kids!” Amanda said.

  “I guess so!” Lorna really didn’t know what Cara thought of these glossy teenaged boys. The magazine said “pin-up,” so that’s what she did. At parent-teacher interviews, Lorna had learned from Mrs. Durant that Cara was struggling socially. She clearly wanted friends, but she was a hanger-on, a follower, easily bullied by the girls whose attention she was trying to secure. It was unsettling. Cara did have one close friend, Samantha Grossman from the down the street, but Lorna wasn’t sure that Sam’s influence was helpful. Sam was an eerily polite girl who seemed to know too much for her age. Once Lorna found Sam and Cara wearing sheets and bathing caps, preparing to go door to door as fake Hare Krishnas. Sam got Cara reading V.C. Andrews, prompting a list of creepy bedtime questions about incest and the afterlife. But if Cara wasn’t with Sam, she was alone in the yard, beating a balding tennis ball against the side of the house for hours. In winter, she did it in the laundry room in the half-dark, the dull thuds spreading through the house. For the coming summer, Lorna had decided to enrol Cara in competitive tennis. It might turn out to be her “stake”: something to lift her up, to provide camaraderie and direction. At Cara’s age, Lorna needed the same thing.

  Amanda centered herself in the middle of the room. She looked dreamily at Kenneth. “This would make a perfect nursery, don’t you think?”

  Lying next to Kenneth in bed, Lorna could never resist asking what he was thinking. “You just want to know if I’m thinking about you,” he’d snapped. “I’m not always thinking about you.” Lorna had told him of course not, of course he wasn’t, she was just interested in him. But was she? What Lorna recalled now was only how desperately she needed to be on his mind.

  “It’s a little dark,” Kenneth said.

  “Helps baby sleep,” Lorna said. “Mega quiet.”

  Mega? Another word Lorna was certain she’d never used before. Don’t blush again, she thought, but she did anyway.

  “Maybe a little dark,” Amanda said. Don’t give in to him, Lorna wanted to say.

  Kenneth scratched his neck and pointed at the door. “Let’s have a quick look on the main floor.”

  They were beginning their way down the stairs when the telephone rang. Lorna squeezed past, brushing Kenneth’s shoulder. “I’ll see you in the kitchen.”

  It was Ruthie Grossman on the phone, Sam’s mom. She wanted to know if Cara could stay for dinner. Lorna looked around for Amanda and Kenneth, but they weren’t right behind her. She assumed they were in the living room, where Amanda would outline her plans to crack it open.

  “Larry�
�s out of town and we’re going to be bad and order Chinese,” Ruthie said. “We’ll get everything! You know how much Cara loves Moo Shu!”

  Ruthie was always very eager to show off whatever she knew about Cara. The other night after the girls’ swim class, she’d asked if Lorna was concerned about the state of Cara’s eyebrows. When Lorna asked why, Ruthie looked at her with such stagy shock it was embarrassing for them both. “They’ve practically disappeared!” she said. “Sammy’s too. I spoke to her, and she said that boys like them that way! And now she’s asking for a sports bra. Can you imagine it?” But there was a gleam in Ruthie’s eye, like she’d been waiting her whole life for these woman-to-woman moments with her daughter. On the drive home, Lorna tried to raise the matter of eyebrows with Cara, but her daughter turned scarlet and said her body was her own business, a message they were drilling hard at school these days.

  “I’m sorry, Ruthie, I’m just in the middle of something—”

  “Well, it’s no extra hassle, if that’s what you’re worried about. Cara’s so polite. It’s truly never a hassle!” The never was rankling, whether or not Ruthie intended it. Cara ate at the Grossmans’ a hell of a lot.

  Lorna watched Amanda and Kenneth enter the kitchen. She smiled vaguely and fluttered her hand –– go ahead!

  “You come, too,” Ruthie said. “As a matter of fact, don’t you dare say no!” Lorna had every intention of saying no. The thought of Chinese food with Ruthie, creepy Sam, and Cara — who would doubtless hate to have her there — was frankly the last way she wanted to spend the evening.

  Lorna watched Kenneth open the pantry door. Again, she tensed. At their apartment, he’d stored everything in glass jars. She kept her sugar, flour, and years-old chocolate chips all slumped in the bags they came in.

  “I’m going to call you back in a minute,” she said to Ruthie.

  Clicking off, Lorna turned to find Amanda with her fingers perched over the stove. She snapped the gas on and jumped back when the flame roared up like an eager orange genie. “We don’t cook much,” Amanda said, laughing.